Belle Wong: writer, reader, creativity junkie

Random on a Saturday – 14/03/2015

I know I said last week I was going to start a new feature called This Week in Pictures but ha! I’ve changed my mind (I’m prone to that kind of thing). I woke up this morning with vague memories of a random-type post that I used to write here, and even vaguer memories that it was usually on a Saturday (or a Tuesday but I’m doing my Snapshot posts on Tuesdays, so that’s taken).

Being too lazy to look it up, I’ve decided to just go ahead with it.

***

Woke up to a bit of a puzzle this morning. The WordPress app on my phone had sent me a notification that my stats were going through the roof (there was something about things going “boom” but I can’t remember the exact wording). Since there’s nothing at all on this blog that could possibly send my stats going through the roof, I checked the app and discovered that I was somehow getting all this traffic from Google News.

Of course, it’s impossible to figure out exactly why I was on Google News, since the links on there keep changing. But the really puzzling thing is that all the people Google News was sending my way were landing on my home page, rather than to any particular blog post. Google News only links to posts and articles on specific sites, rather than to sites themselves, so how was this happening?

I’ll probably never figure it out. On the bright side, people seemed to have liked what they saw, as most of them clicked through to read 2.48 pages. Yes.

Update: I should probably mention that to WordPress, “stats going through the roof” seems to be all relative. So if you normally get a couple of hits a day, and it sees ten visitors in two hours, it will interpret this as your stats going through the roof. At least, that’s how it seems to have been working in my case – my “stats explosion” didn’t even get into triple digits!

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Filing this under “it figures”, I was all set to read Pet Sematarytoday while waiting for Dylan to finish his dance classes (on Saturday afternoons, I am there for three and a half hours) and my Kobo ran out of juice. I can’t fathom how this happened, because I checked the battery gauge before I packed the darn thing, and it was nearly full. If it hadn’t been, I would have taken the charger with me. So I ended up having to do some work instead.

***

This week’s photos

(Thought I’d sneak this in here, which will then also save me the trouble of scrambling around for a graphic for this post.)

The first two photos were taken last Sunday on our walk back from the ballet. The last picture was taken on our way there. I thought the book-reading demon‘s shadow looked so eerie.

4 thoughts on “Random on a Saturday – 14/03/2015”

Haha, I wish, Kathy! I should revise the post to mention that to WordPress it’s all relative. So if you normally get two hits a day, and you get 10 in the space of two hours, that’s equivalent to your stats going through the roof. That was basically what happened this morning

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I'm a writer, avid reader, artist-at-heart & book indexer. I blog about writing, books, art, creativity, spirituality, & the power of the imagination. Oh, and I like to write stuff about life in general, too!

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot." - Stephen King

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The purpose of being a serious writer is not to express oneself, and it is not to make something beautiful, though one might do those things anyway. Those things are beside the point. The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair. If you keep that in mind always, the wish to make something beautiful or smart looks slight and vain in comparison. If people read your work and, as a result, choose life, then you are doing your job.

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